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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

People are spending more time on social media and there are several conversations going on covering almost every topic which you can think of. The next big thing in the world of internet is the "Social Media". There are several etiquette which one needs to follow for a better environment on these social sites.

Social Media Etiquette Do's and Dont's

Do's

Do share what's useful

If you belong to any community or group then you should share something that is useful and relevant to the community or group. Sharing and contributing to the growth of the community adds to your reputation and promotes a healthy conversation.

Do count your words

You must count your words and say more in a little. One good example is Twitter which allows only 140 characters per tweet. Posts that are extremely long are often avoided. Instead, share that is important and avoid including unnecessary words.

Be original

You must use your original identity across all your social media networks. People love to communicate with original profiles and they can easily figure out what's not original. To promote a healthy social environment, you must remain true and always provide your original identity.

Do Remain Active

Social Media is all about sharing your opinions and remain active. You must respond to other shares,tweets,messages and must remain active. The more you remain active, the more your profile would be visible to others.

Dont's

Do not share confidential information

You must not share confidential information with the general audience. You must not share phone numbers, credit card numbers, home address without the permission of the user.

Do not Spam

Spamming and social media go hand to hand. Almost every third person is found spamming in these sites. Experts say that around 40% account on Facebook and Twitter are spam.Spamming can be done by posting the same message again and again, creating fake accounts, etc.

Do not annoy anyone

Social media platforms are for user engagement, these are not meant to annoy anyone. Hence, you should not make fun of others, poke anyone unnecessarily, send constant messages etc. Remember you are here to make friends not enemies.

Monday, July 30, 2012

There are certain guidelines which you must follow in order to design a Seo
friendly web page which increases your chances of ranking high on search
engines. Read the below mentioned guidelines and try to incorporate these as
basic design elements while designing your web page.

Use basic HTML

Nothing works better than basic HTML as the search engine crawlers can
easily parse the content displayed via basic HTML tags. Hence, it is always
advised to use basic HTML for creating content and links.

Most of the web developers ignore the title tag and the Meta tag while
designing the web page and this is one of the basic reasons for your site not
performing well on search engines. Also, I have seen many designers using the
company name as the title tag in the home page as well as all of its inner
pages. This is not the best practice and should be avoided. Each and every web
page has its own individual identity and as such, they must have unique title
and description tags. An ideal web page must have a proper title tag,
description tag and keyword tag. An example is given below:-
Suppose you have a web page selling Teddy Bears online, an ideal title and
meta tags combination for this page would be :-

<title> Buy Teddy Bears Online-FREE shipping worldwide</title>

<des>Large varieties of Teddy Bears available online on brandsteddy.
Buy online and get free shipping worldwide</des>

In this way you can have a unique title and meta tags for all of your web
pages. This helps the search engines to understand the contents of a web page
as per their relevancy metrics.

Use Heading tags

The heading tags comes in various sizes from H1 to H6. You should use these
tags to outline the important words present on the web page in the decreasing
order of importance , i.e. from H1 to H6. The most important words like the
document title should be enclosed within H1 tag, the subheading in H2 tag and
accordingly.

Suppose you are having a web page describing the rainy day. An ideal use of
Heading tags should be done as given below:-

In this way you must use the heading tags in decreasing order of importance
starting from H1 tag.

Keep the important words in Bold

Always keep in mind that you are designing a web page keeping in mind your
audience, so keep the important words in bold wherever possible. This would
help your audience to reach the important lines of your document in an easier
way. The brand name, any important dates, important executives name, your main
targeted keywords etc. should be kept in bold.

Use contextual links

All of you must have read Wikipedia searching for some term or other.
Wikipedia organizes its content beautifully with contextual links. These links
enhances the user experience as well as help search engine crawlers to index
the inner pages in an effective manner. Links displayed contextually are valued
more by the search engines. For all those of you, who do not know what
contextual links are, an example is given below:-

Contextual links are those links that are present in the main content of the
web page.

This is the most common mistake which most of the designers make. Now ,
whenever you add an image in your content, use alt text to describe the
contents of the image. Alt tags helps the search engine crawlers to identify
the contents of the image and helps them to rank a web page using their
relevancy metrics.

Use Text links instead of image links

Text links are always useful and favored more than image links. The basic
reason being an anchor text is associated with every text link which helps to
capitalize on the power of anchor text.

Follow W3C guidelines

The best approach is to follow the W3C guidelines as this would help to eliminate any coding errors.

Test your page on a Text browser

After you have completed the designing of your web page, be sure to check it on a text browser like lynx as this will help you to eliminate any shortcomings of your webpage. A text browser would help you to analyze a web page just as the crawlers would do.

Check Robots.txt

Make sure, you have not blocked the crawlers from accessing your website via robots.txt.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Ecommerce websites are those huge shopping portals where people engage in
buying and selling activities. These websites are large comprising of thousands
of pages and as such doing seo for these websites requires a lot of extra
effort and a few tricks.

Optimize the Product Page

For an Ecommerce website, the most important page is the product page. Make
sure you are having a seo friendly url, proper title tag, unique product
description and original user comments. An ideal product page should consist of
the following parts:-

1-Have search engine friendly url's

The url of the product page should be search engine
friendly. This can improve your seo and can

get you good search engine
rankings. An example of search engine friendly url would be :-

http://www.exampleecommerce.com/product-url.php
or http://www.exampleecommerce.com/product-url
or http://www.exampleecommerce.com/producturl
The above are examples of a good url structure

Example:-

Suppose there is an ecommerce site selling Birthday cakes online, then an
ideal product url must match the product name and should be located under the
category directory.
http://www.exampleecommerce.com/chocolate-birthday-cake
or
http://www.exampleecommerce.com/cakes/chocolate-birthday-cake

2-Have a unique description

I have seen many estore owners doing this mistake of adding the description
given by the product vendors under the product description. Actually the
vendors provide the same description to each and every estore where they sell
their products and hence the content becomes duplicate. In order to have a
unique description for a product page, you must rewrite the content and add
some marketing headlines containing your brand name, your estore name in it. In
this way, your site would have something unique in the product description.

3-Let users comment on the page

Feedbacks are always welcome as these are great ways to judge the popularity
of the product. Nowadays the new platform ecommerce stores are having this
built in feature of commenting. When the users comment on a particular product,
they add some unique content to the page and unknowingly your page become
aunique source. These feedbacks comes from real people and the search engine
love content created by real people.

4-Have a unique title

You must have a unique title tag for every product page. Having unique
titles containing your brand name gives you a better chance of ranking. A good
approach to creating unique title is given below:-

Images contained in the product page have a lot more use that what you
thought previously. An image has several properties and as a successful seo
strategy, you must use all these image properties effectively. These properties
are image description, image alt tag and the image title tag. You must use the
product name in these areas to optimize your product pages.

6-Use the power of Sitemaps

Sitemaps are an easier way to notify the search engines whenever you add new
pages to your websites. Maintain both sitemap.html and sitemap.xml as this will
help in the easy crawling of your website and will give you the maximum
benefit.

Here is an useful video from Matt Cutts which would help you in understanding the basics of doing seo for ecommerce site:-

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

With the growth of Facebook as a social media platform, businesses have
starting spending on the marketing channels of Facebook. The main business wing
of Facebook is the Fan page which helps a business to grow on the world’s
largest social media platform.

Top 10 Business Apps for Facebook Page

Add your blog on Networked Blogs and connect with other bloggers, friends, news feeds. Post news feed about your posts directly on Facebook, Twitter and Mobile. It has been correctly described as "Panorama of stories and pictures".

Pinterest is the latest social media buzz. You can combine the influence of Pinterest with Facebook and get the most for your business. With this App you can show your Pinterest boards as a tab on a Facebook Page.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Mobile search is increasing day by day and the need of Mobile Seo is also increasing. New Mobile Operating systems are available which gives you the flexibility to use any mobile browser of your choice, instead of using the built in browser. The top mobile browsers are given below:-

Now you can promote your tweets in a specific state of your business area
and reach more specific customers. This is a great move by Twitter which would
help the local business owners to give a head start to their business campaign.

1- You can reach local audience without wasting unnecessary money on untargeted areas.
2- You can reach users from specific country or state. This eliminates the need to send tweets to all your followers.
3- You can reach mobile audiences who use smartphones to connect with Twitter.
4- Advertisers who use promoted tweets would be able to use targeted tweets.

Friday, July 20, 2012

﻿﻿ Mobile Phone searches are increasing day after day and that year is not too far when we will witness mobile search taking over desktop search. As per the official Google Mobile blog “With a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250%, 850,000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million. These numbers are a testament to the break-neck speed of innovation that defines the Android ecosystem.” This clearly gives us an indication of how fast mobile search is taking over desktop search.

World's Largest Smartphone Vendors

Mobile Seo Guidelines:How to do Mobile Seo?

With the increasing searches done with the help of smartphones, it has become extremely necessary to start seriously about Mobile Seo. So, what's the difference between the traditional seo and Mobile seo? Nothing much, just change in the guidelines which are explained below:-

1- Get a separate version of Mobile website

You need to create a separate version of your website for mobile audiences. Google has a unique bot for mobile websites known as the Googlebot-Mobile. You need to present the mobile version of your website to the Googlebot-Mobile and the desktop version of your website to the regular Googlebot.

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Do not worry, this won't result in cloaking. See what Matt Cutts has to say in this regard-

There are several tools available online which could help you to generate mobile friendly content. Some of the well known tools are bmobilized, mobicanvas, mobify, dudamobile etc . Besides this you should have a unique title tag, description tag, H1 tag, image alt tag etc on your website.

5- Follow W3C Guidelines

You should follow W3c guidelines while creating mobile friendly content for your website. A good starting point would be to read Mobile web best practices 1.0 .

6- Maintain the Site Speed

Mobile users are faster than the desktop users. They expect faster results and do not go beyond the first 3 results returned by the search engines. This is the reason, search engines have included the site speed as one of its ranking metrics. You need to keep your site simple so that it loads faster and presents the answers to its queries. You may use Mobitest for checking the performance of your mobile site.

7- Use valid XHTML 1.0

XHTML stands for Xtensible Hyper Text Mark Up Language. It is the first document type in the XHTML family. HTML 4 has been reformulated into XHTML 1.0. This version enables easy integration of new modules and enhances user agent interoperability.

8- Don't neglect traditional Seo best practices

The old school seo practices needs to be practiced as before. Mobile Seo is not a new science, methods and practices of backlink building (one of the most important metrics of search engine optimization) remains the same. Hence, implement the same set of on page and off page strategies as you did in the past.

9- Concentrate on Local Seo

People who search with the help of mobile devices search locally. Mobile devices are often used to search local information, hence try and concentrate on best local seo practices, if you are doing local seo. Choose keywords that users are most likely to locally find your business and optimize your website accordingly.

10- Test,Test it

After you have implemented all the changes, you must test your mobile website for its correctness and mobile friendliness. You may use W3C mobile validator to test your website:- http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Facebook is the world’s largest social media network with a shopping 900 million + active users. It is feasible for businesses to market their products and services on Facebook. Following a marketing strategy that could earn reasonable results would be a dream come true. This post would discuss the essentials of Facebook Marketing Strategy.

Facebook Marketing Strategy with measurable results

Why Choose Facebook?

You should choose Facebook as it is the world’s most accessed Social media. It has its presence in over 213 countries of the world with people accessing the social platform from Europe,Asia, NorthAmerica,South America,Africa and Australia. Marketers can make use of enormous data available on Facebook which includes geographical location,interests,Gender,mobile users etc. Where else can you find such a vast amount of user data compiled by locations and interests? It is the most preferred source of marketing channel for businesses.
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The Facebook Platform

Launched in February 2004, and created by Marc Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew Mc Collum, Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes;Facebook has since became one of the most accessed site on the internet. Initially started as a networking platform for Harvard Students, Facebook has grown into a full fledged social networking site providing users a good platform to share their content which may include text, images, videos and other media.

Facebook gives you the ability to create your profile and start making friends. The platform has options for creating Pages, Groups and Events. You can use these channels to promote your products and services.

Create Notes for your Marketing Plan

Before any campaign is started, proper forecasting should be done. You need to prepare notes for your marketing plan in order to implement it successfully. Some questions which you need to answer are given below:-

1-What are your business goals?

2-Who are your audience?

3-What is your target market?

4-Do you want to build your online reputation?

5-Do you want to increase your brand awareness?

6-What are your business keywords?

7-What are your conversion channels?

8-What is your online advertising budget?

9-What does your Fans like the most?

10- How to integrate applications with Facebook Pages?

11-Which applications can help you in the smooth flow of your communications?

Creating a Facebook Page

You must have a Facebook Profile, before you can create a Facebook Page. If you have a profile, then you must visit any Facebook Page and click on Create a Page to get a page for your business. Here are the steps to creating a Page:-

2- Click on “Create a group” after visiting any existing group on Facebook.

3-Name your group

4-Invite your friends to your group.

5-Check “Open” if you want to let anyone see the contents of the group else choose closed or secret.

6-Provide a description for your group.

7-Provide a name for the email id.

8-Upload photo and choose category.

9-You are ready to invite other members and start your discussion.

Adding Applications to your Page

Facebook provides you with innumerable applications which you may use for the success of your business.
Getting Likes for your Fan Page

Top 10 Strategies

1-Know your audience- The very first step in successful marketing strategy is knowing your audience. Facebook provides you with data where you can easily find out your ideal audience to target based on the georgraphical location, gender, age and interests.

2- Create a nice Landing Page- Remember, your targeted audiences would visit your Facebook Page to know more about your company and its products or services. Having a nice landing page would make them understand your company in a better way. The motto of “First impression is the last impression” would work best here.

3-Post Quality Content- Your fans have liked you because they think you are a source of useful information about their interests. It’s your responsibility to share constant updates about your company’s products, various activities, images, content and any other media which your fans may find interesting.

4- Turn on Discussions- Every post created by you should have some scope for further discussions. The more discussions, the more user engagement and the more user engagement, the more the chances of your page coming in the eyes of new audiences to increase your target market.

5- Keep your fans engaged- Start a contest and let your fans remain engaged with your brand in one way or the other.

6- Get more Likes- This is the measure of the popularity of the business. Hence, getting more likes adds to the reputation and popularity of the business.

7- Use Applications- These are your real friends in the online world of marketing. Your business pages needs them to actively promote your services infront of your audiences.

8- Follow Ettiquettes- You must follow several social media ettiquettes while prmoting your brand on these popular social marketing channels.

9- Daily Hour Approach- You must spend at least one hour of your time on a daily basis to promote your serives. This daily hour approach can go a long time to popularize your brand.

10- Maintaining the Edgerank- Edgerank is similar to Google's Pagrank and it measures the post popularity. You need to keep an eye on the Edgerank in order to gain more visibility in front of your targeted audiences. Edgerank depends upon time decay factor, weight factor and the engagement factor.

11- Measuring the Success- The last but not the least is the measurement of the success of the campaign. There are several online tools which can help you to measure the audience engagement and finally your return on investment (ROI). This is important as the money spent should be taken care of and the full utilization should be made.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Local listings are a great way to earn citations as well as valuable local niche backlinks for your website. There are several local business listing websites which offer a free listing for your business. These websites are local to city,country or niche. These include web directories, yellow pages, B2B directories,global directories,local city directories etc. The compiled list of websites which offer free business listing are given below:-

Sunday, July 15, 2012

﻿ Google has updated its Webmaster tools to add a new feature to enable the webmasters to add crawl alert forwarding to their inbox in case Google finds some issues related to the crawling of the website.

What's this new Crawl error alert feature?

Now, Google would send messages to your webmaster account in case it finds any issues related to crawling of your website. You may also forward the messages to your inbox by activating message forwarding.

Url Error Alert- Most common errors with websites like 404 not found errors. Google sends alert only when they encounter a large number of errors for any of the five categories of errors (Server error, Soft 404, Access denied, Not found or Not followed).

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Videos are a common medium of entertainment among a lot of internet users. Although, a majority of web users use YouTube as the major source of video but there are some players in the market who can give a strong competition to YouTube. These sites are mentioned below:-

Thursday, July 12, 2012

KISS stands for “Keep it Simple Stupid” and following this approach in Seo
is helpful. Seo is an industry which is evolving fast and things change
frequently. As such, the professionals who belong to the seo industry must
follow a simple approach while doing seo for their clients and they must remain
open to learning.

Keep it Simple

Seo is all about keeping simple as much as possible. The strategies you
follow, the techniques you use, should be simple and transparent. Many times it
happens that your client’s asks about the strategies you will follow while
doing the Seo for their website. It is your responsibility to explain in detail
about the Seo process and the various methods you will use for doing on page
and off page seo . The process should not be complicated and the client must
feel that you are using genuine approach and keeping it transparent.

Keep it Stupid

Seo is something which needs research and learning. Your seo work must
consist of 70% work and 30% research. I personally feel , this is the ideal
stragety to follow while doing any sort of Seo work. You should remain open to
learning new things almost on a daily basis or to find new data related to your
work. If you follow the same strategies list wise, which every other seo
follows, then you will not learn new things . Hence, you must remain stupid all
the time and learn as much as possible. Analyzing your competitors and keeping up-to-date
with the latest search engine trends are necessary.

Stop words

﻿﻿ Stop words are those words that do not add any semantic value to the search. Common words such as the,as,are,by,can,for,from,it,in,into etc. come into the category of stop words. Search engines have become smarter in finding out the relationship between words and in this process, it follows the words that can help in finding out the real meaning of a combination of words. Hence, the search engines drop out these stop words in order to return the most relevant and semantic results.

Another big reason, the search engines do not make use of the stop words because these words takes up unnecessary space and time taken to solve a given query. Computers assign space to each and every character and the stop words might take up space which could be used for storing necessary words which adds to the semantic value of searches.

Example

If you are searching with a phrase "The effects of nicotine on human body" then the search engine algorithms would parse it word by word as given below:-

Hence, the resultant search query would look like:- "effects nicotine human body". The words chosen after ignoring the stop words are helpful in finding out the semantic value of the search and instead of including 7 words in finding the matches on its web index, it includes just 4 words. In this way it saves both time and space without hampering the quality of search results.